Blog.

January ends today, which I believe means that the statute of limitations on posts reflecting on the past year ends as well. I felt it would be remiss for me to not at least highlight a few things that I spent my time on last year.

2011 was a big year. As the year started, I was currently working on an as-yet unannounced, top-secret project for Threadless, alongside Good Apples.

Maintaining the status quo.

I originally read the post the day it came out and I’ve been mulling over it. Something was bugging me. Not just about the idea of a Rails Maturity Model certification, but even the idea of a guild of some kind as proposed by Steven Bristol.

Here’s the thing (and I think this is provable time and time again in much more mature industries): trade guilds, trade associations and standards bodies maintain the status quo. They do everything they can to do so, even when it’s not to the benefit of the industry or the clients/customers of that industry.

And why it was rewritten in Rails.

The thing that’s so wonderful about using beautiful, appropriate tools is that they become an extension of you, your body, you fingertips, and your mind. They get out of the way and let you directly interact with the problem you are solving. Everyone’s tried to remove a screw without a screwdriver; a task quickly becomes impossible that otherwise would be trivial.

Quite a Christmas Present.

There is no single solution. What ruby does offer is a more intuitive way of coding. Its form is simple. It’s full of grace. Ruby is succinct. It’s not the messiah of languages though it attracts many messiah-figures and their fanboy prototypes. There is a market for it, there are people that love to code it, and that’s about it. I don’t want to hear you rant on about it… It’s ok to bite the hand that feeds you. Just don’t bite it off.

For a lot of reasons Ruby (and, by implication, Ruby on Rails) is polarizing. I love that people are really passionate about it—one way or the other.

But more importantly, I’m with Renae. I love what it allows me to do. I love that it has introduced me to a world where I can create solutions to problems, where I can build things that other people use in a way I never could before, for my clients, and for myself. But I don’t lose perspective about it. It’s a tool. Right now it’s one of the best I have available to me and I love using it. But there will be others.

This is a great write-up of Shopify’s transition to Passenger and the benefits. I first mentioned Passenger in this post. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s fun to read how it’s working out for other people. I’ve always thought that a solution like this would make Rails that much more viable.

Once you’ve completed the incredibly simple installation, you get an Apache that acts as both web server, load balancer, application server and process watcher. You simply drop in your application and touch tmp/restart.txt when you want to bounce it and bam, you’re up and running.

David, talking about the new Phusion Passenger for deploying Rails apps. Up to this point I’ve settled into a Mongrel / nginx routine for our apps and liked it a lot (especially the light-weight footprint of nginx). But this looks like fun – I’ll have to give it a shot!